The Citadel And The Dark

Danny's POV

A searing, burning sensation shot through my palms, and I nearly yanked my hands back in agony. But the second my skin locked onto the decay, something extraordinary happened.

A blinding golden green light erupted beneath my fingertips.

It raced through the blackened earth like glowing veins, illuminating the dead ground beneath my hands. Wherever the light touched, the bubbling purple sludge recoiled violently.

The corrosive liquid hissed.

FZZZZZZT!

I gritted my teeth, ignoring the fire in my arms, and dug my fingers deeper into the soil. "Come on! Work, damn it!"

The light flared brighter.

Before my eyes, the melting earth stopped dissolving. The toxic purple contamination faded away, leaving behind rich, dark soil that looked almost impossibly healthy against the surrounding.

And the purification didn't stop.

The golden-green glow spread outward, racing across the ground in a widening wave. Five meters. Ten meters. Fifteen meters.

A clear, solid path emerged before us, stretching from our position all the way toward the safe route beyond the ruined compound.

The purple sludge vanished. The bubbling ground solidified. Even the sickening chemical stench melted into the night air.

I could barely believe my own eyes. Holy shit. I am actually healing the earth.

The longer I maintained contact with the soil, however, the heavier the toll. My arms trembled, sweat blinding my eyes as something inside my core was steadily drained.

[WARNING! Eden Energy is decreasing.]

[Purification Progress: 100%.]

[Emergency Mission Completed!]

[All fifteen military personnel within the designated evacuation route are now protected from the immediate soil contamination hazard.]

[REWARD ISSUED: One Special Plant Seed.]

A tiny golden object materialized and hovered above my palm. It was no bigger than my fingernail, its surface shimmering with delicate green veins.

[Item Acquired: Special Plant Seed.]

[Plant Information: Classified. Additional information will become available when the host meets the required conditions.]

I stared at the glowing speck in my hand.

A seed? The apocalypse was crawling with flesh-eating monsters, the ground was turning into acid, and my grand reward was a bloody seed?

"You're joking, right?" I muttered.

[The System does not engage in jokes, Host.]

"Well, you bloody well should start. Your personality is garbage."

I shoved the seed into my pocket and lifted my head.

The fifteen soldiers stood in absolute, stunned silence, staring at the newly restored path.

Not a single trace of purple sludge remained.

Even the mutated beasts had stopped advancing. Their guttural roars faded as they recoiled from the purified earth, turning tail and retreating back into the dark treeline.

Everything went dead quiet.

I slumped forward, gasping for air. My palms were caked in dirt, my arms shaking so badly I could barely keep my balance.

Tony stepped up beside Chadwick, his rifle still smoking, looking at me with a sharp, calculating eye. "Alpha... Danny may be a lot of things, but right now? He’s useful. He managed to save us. Let's take him back to the fortress first."

Chadwick didn't say a word. He just gave a tight, lethal nod.

Within minutes, we were shoved into the back of an armored military transport. The engine roared to life, kicking up thick dust as we sped away from the ruins and deep into the safe zone.

When the vehicle finally ground to a halt, we were at the Central Citadel Shelter, a bleak massive concrete fortress surrounded by razor wire, high-voltage searchlights, and armed patrols.

Post-apocalyptic bunker style at its finest.

The heavy metal gates groaned open, and the moment my boots hit the concrete courtyard, cold steel cuffs were slapped tightly around my wrists.

Every eye in the courtyard snapped toward me. Murmurs instantly rippled through the crowd of civilian refugees.

"What is this lunatic doing here?!" a sharp, furious voice shrieked over the noise.

A striking woman in pristine, high class clothes and an aggressive scowl shoved her way through the guards.

My downloaded memories instantly supplied her name: Katherine. The high-ranking Omega, and future Luna of the pack.

"Katherine, calm down," Chadwick said, his voice lowering as he stepped forward to catch her by the shoulders.

Katherine barely spared him a glance before her eyes locked onto Noah and Lyra standing near Tony.

Her face twisted into a mask of righteous disgust. "Those poor children shouldn't even be breathing the same air as that monster! Look what he almost did to them."

Before I could say a word, Katherine marched over to the kids, grabbing Noah by the shoulder and pulling Lyra by the wrist. "Come along, sweet darlings. You're safe now. Stay away from that filth."

Lyra’s eyes went wide with panic. She yanked her arm back, looking past Katherine at me. "Daddy.....!" she cried out, her small hand reaching desperately toward my direction.

"Lyra!" I yelled, taking a step forward, but a heavy handed guard slammed me back against the transport.

"Move it, scum!" the guard barked.

Katherine didn't hesitate. She cruelly yanked Lyra’s arm, ignoring the little girl's terrified sobbing, and dragged her away into the shelter buildings while Noah stumbled along behind them.

My chest tightened with raw fury.

As the guards hauled me deeper into the courtyard, the surrounding crowd hurled abuse.

"Disgrace!"

"He almost killed our Alpha!"

"He tried to sell his own kids!"

I forced myself to stare straight ahead, grinding my teeth until my jaw ached. In my real life on Earth, I would have broken their jaws, I thought, my chest burning.

But getting violent here just proves their point. Besides... I’m not even the bastard who did all of the evil they talked about.

As we passed through the wide steel doors, an elderly woman spat on the ground near my boots, her face ugly with venom. "Vile snake. He even cheated on our Alpha! Slept with a Beta behind his back!"

That was the absolute breaking point. I stopped dead in my tracks, ignoring the guards pulling my arms.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me!" I snapped, spinning around to glare at her. "You can call me a murderous lunatic and I'll take it, but don't you ever call me a cheat! Danny Rodriguez never cheated on anyone! How dare you make up sick lies like that?!"

Tony frowned from behind, leaning his head sideways in pure confusion. "Why do you keep referring to yourself in the third person like you're someone else?"

"Because fuck, I am!" I yelled back, throwing my cuffed hands up.

POOF.

A glowing blue screen popped up in mid-air:

[Actually, Host, you are the original Danny Rodriguez. There was a cosmic error during....]

Can you just bloody SHUT UP?! I screamed at the System in my head. You're the one who dragged me into this mess.

I glared the screen out of existence, muttering under my breath as the guards shoved me forward down a dim, industrial hallway.

Unbelievable. I'm not even attracted to men anyway. Good thing everyone here hates me. At least no Alpha is ever going to touch me.

Finally, we stopped in front of a heavy, industrial grade steel door at the end of a freezing corridor.

A guard punched a code into the digital lock with a sharp clack.

Before they threw me inside, I whipped around, thrusting my cuffed wrists toward Chadwick. "Are you seriously not going to take these off?"

"No," Chadwick replied coldly, his face carved from ice.

"I bloody saved all of your lives out there!" I snapped, disbelief warring with anger.

"No," Chadwick said flatly, his dark eyes dead and empty. "You only wanted to save yourself."

With a brutal shove, Chadwick slammed me forward into the threshold.

CLANG!

CLICK.

The heavy deadbolt locked shut from the outside.

I whirled around instantly and my heart instantly plummeted into a bottomless pit.

It was pitch black. No windows. No emergency lights. Absolute, suffocating darkness. Not a single sliver of light filtered through the thick steel frame.

"No..." I breathed, my voice instantly cracking as my lungs forgot how to pull in air. "No, no, no..."

I hate the dark.

A cold, blinding sweat broke out across my forehead. Panic seized my chest like an iron fist, crushing my ribs.

I stumbled forward blindly in the blackness, my cuffed hands flailing wildly until they slammed hard against the solid metal door.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

"Let me out!" I screamed, my voice fracturing into a terrified shriek. "Let me out! You have to let me out!"

The heavy darkness swallowed my voice whole, refusing to echo.

It dragged me backward across time and space, hurling me straight into the worst memories of my childhood, I was locked away for hours in a freezing, windowless broom closet with my baby brother Connor, listening to our father's muffled violence and breaking glass echoing from the living room every single time he raised his hands against our mother.

"Please!" I sobbed, my knees buckling beneath me as I slid down the freezing steel door, curling into a tight ball on the floor. "Please... don't leave me in the dark..I am scared..."